Making the CentOS 6 Boot Splash Screen More Verbose

Making the CentOS 6 Boot Splash Screen More Verbose

CentOS 6 comes with a splash screen that displays a progress bar as it boots. This looks nice and might be cool on a desktop for some eye candy but I’d rather watch what is happening. You can hit any key during the boot process to make the boot splash screen disappear and display what its doing when its booting but that’s annoying and I’d rather it have it spit out all the gory details of what the server is doing automatically without human intervention.

To make CentOS 6 display the details about what its doing while it boots, first make a backup of the file at /etc/grub.conf in case something goes wrong. Then open /etc/grub.conf in your favorite editor, and look for the line(s) that begin with ‘kernel’. At the end of them you’ll see ‘rhgb’ and ‘quiet’. You’ll want to remove both of those words from grub.conf. After saving your changes, reboot the server and you can see everything its doing when it starts up.

You can also hit the Up arrow on your keyboard during the boot process to switch to verbose output.
Down arrow to switch back to the dumb progress bar.

http://www.facebook.com/csmwww Cris Mooney

Bit of extra related info for those wandering through the quagmire of CentOS like me: in quiet mode that boot information normally shown on the screen is logged in the file /var/log/boot.log. So, if you are just trying to review the startup to diagnose some problem, you may just be able to examine that file and not mess with your kernel’s args.

http://www.facebook.com/russthom Russ Thompson

thank you, my server is across the room, grabbing for the keyboard is a mess.

http://twitter.com/mushroomrage Erik Bergman

Thanks! I have been looking for this a long time now. :)

http://www.bikexprt.com/streetsmarts/usa/index.htm billdav

I just did an upgrade from 6.3 to 6.4 and it hangs showing this progress bar. The progress bar gets to complete but then nothing.

I reset the machine and got into grub. I don’t see rhgb or quiet on my kernel command line.

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